An American airman at the US military base in Okinawa, Japan has been suspended for one year[1] after pleading guilty to breaking into a Japanese home, ransacking the place, and punching a teenage girl in the face while she was sleeping. He had been drinking heavily, according to reports.

Tens of thousands of US troops have been stationed in Japan since WWII, and the local population has been firmly against the occupation with frequent protests urging their removal. Up to 85% of the Okinawan population wants US troops out. Not only do they not want to be occupied by a foreign military, but they’re fed up with the outrageous behavior of the American Marines.

Japanese leaders can’t submit to the will of the people on this issue for obvious reasons: the mafia don in Washington won’t allow it. “In 2010, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama pledged to relocate the U.S. base, then backtracked[4] under US pressure,” reports[5] the Washington Post. “Outraged Okinawans staged public protests, demonstrations spread to Tokyo, Hatoyama’s approval rating plummeted to 25 percent and he resigned[6].”

Seemingly in order to placate the Japanese, Washington pledged last year to relocate about 9,000 US Marines from their bases in Okinawa, with about 5,000 transferred to Guam and the rest spread among other locations in the region. This coincided with Obama’s Asia-Pivot, an unconcealed policy of military containment of China that requires boosting US presence in the region. The deadline for the adjustment was 2014.